I recently changed careers from philanthropy to entertainment, and my first few months in Hollywood have been an education.
When I arrived, I encountered an industry that was reckoning with epochal upheavals in technology, distribution and consumer expectations. New formats were evolving at astonishing speed. Every conversation I had — whether on podcasts or panels, in one business lunch and welcome dinner after another — turned to the topic of an industry in apparent free fall.
The ostensible question was: Can we continue to make movies and shows that resonate with new audiences? The more fundamental, even existential, question lurking behind it: Have we lost an entire generation of viewers to online platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat — or more confounding still, to livestreaming sites like Twitch and Kick?
For some in the entertainment industry, this is a period of creative destruction, as irreversible as the march of progress itself. I see it differently.
In entertainment — as in nearly every aspect of American life — we are dealing with the progeny of inequality: distrust and loneliness, deteriorating democratic institutions and the rapid decay of a shared identity that once knit us together. This crisis seems to be affecting young people in particular: the generation that came of age in our atomized era, enduring the algorithmic tsunami of social media’s first wave and then navigating the rupture of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In Hollywood, this led to a few misbegotten assumptions about America’s rising generation: that members of Generation Z would forever choose small screens over big ones, short-form over feature-length, digital over physical, isolated over communal. There was even something comforting in this cynicism: the sense that young people were simply beyond our reach, let alone our understanding.
Yet I believe that periods of disruption inevitably produce their own countervailing force, their own backlash, a Newtonian equal but opposite reaction. And I believe one such rejoinder is emerging, especially among the young, in the form of a profound yearning for shared experiences and connection that remind us all that we belong to something larger than ourselves.
I remember my own experience of this youthful yearning — when, for example, my college friends and I would pile into a beat-up, run-down Chevrolet and descend upon the old Texas Theater in Austin to sing and dance boisterously along with late-night screenings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” That sense of camaraderie, the subversive thrill, all experienced together, still feels palpable to me all of these decades later.
Today, this same sense of yearning is finding new expression. We saw it recently in the surprise success of several films, “Backrooms” and “Obsession” foremost among them, that have upended conventional wisdom in Hollywood about young audiences and their willingness to venture out en masse to theaters. But we can see evidence of it everywhere. Young people are lining up at concerts, comedy shows and other live experiences. Running clubs and gaming communities turn digital interactions into analog relationships. Barnes & Noble, once written off as a casualty of e-commerce, has opened stores by the dozen in response to customers who value the experience of a neighborhood bookstore that serves as a crossroads.
The shifting current overflowed into the streets of New York City as tens of thousands of people celebrated the Knicks’ championship win last month. Yes, fans always celebrate in victory, but walking amid the exultation while in New York, I found myself moved by the spontaneous public outburst of the young, and the young at heart, reveling in community together.
At first glance, these may all appear to be separate threads. But woven together, we can appreciate a broader patchwork. We human beings remain stubbornly, beautifully starving for one another. More surprising — and heartening — we are looking upward and outward, and returning to one another after being tethered for so long to our screens.
This all portends well for the entertainment business, no doubt. Leaders across the industry can see and seize this moment of possibility, opening our apertures and expanding our imaginations, investing in creators and projects that represent, reflect and serve younger audiences, forging new kinds of partnerships across digital platforms, exhibitors and live experiences alike.
But this moment portends even better for our democracy — and for our humanity.
These days, our wider culture and politics are consumed by a very old story of power — about the resurgence of a “might makes right” mentality that enables corruption and cruelty and impunity. But I believe, with greater conviction than ever, in the power of story to lead us through and forward.
Storytellers — and the stories they tell — expose and reveal. They challenge and provoke. They lift our sights and spirits. They bring dignity and grace where those virtues have been denied, and faith and hope and love where they have been suppressed.
This, perhaps, is what younger audiences seek now: Less empty escape, more mutual recognition; less mindless content, more mutual connection. After all, we’ve always gathered around stories, sports, music and art to laugh, to wonder, to feel something and to feel part of something.
History affirms that what begins in culture rarely stays there. Our civic life — our politics — always has flowed downstream from culture. Nearly two centuries ago, surveying our early republic, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans possess an exceptional instinct for “the art of association,” for joining together, organically and authentically, in common purpose and pursuit.
To be sure, this is a turbulent time of transition and transformation in the entertainment industry — and in many other industries. But amid the noise is a clarion signal: Through our art, we are rediscovering community. The playwright Tom Stoppard once wrote that the words and work of stories, at their best, can “nudge the world a little.” Let us serve the storytellers who inform, influence and inspire — who, even when it seems the center cannot hold, nudge us closer to one another.
Darren Walker is the chief executive of Anonymous Content and a former president of the Ford Foundation.
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